The primary goal of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources is to identify, create and/or repurpose existing OER as Open Textbooks and make them available for use by community college students and faculty. We are seeking the support of faculty to identify, review, evaluate, and make available high quality, accessible and culturally relevant model Open Textbooks.
Over the past five years, The Hewlett Foundation’s Open Educational Resources (OER1) Initiative has worked to equalize access to education by sponsoring the development of high quality content made freely available on the Web, removing barriers to the use of the content and carrying out research to understand and stimulate use. Together with partners from universities, the private sector, governments and intergovernmental organizations, the foundation has helped nurture the field of open educational resources from an infancy of scattered, often low quality content across the Web to a robust early adolescence characterized by energy and idealism. Major accomplishments to date include shifting the culture in higher education universities and organizations to share content previously held private; helping to create a powerful portfolio of open, high quality education materials and tools that are used all over the world; supporting the development of a more flexible copyright system; mobilizing a strong movement of individuals, institutions, and international agencies throughout the world; supporting the preservation and open access of books, moving images, audio and text; and demonstrating the capacity of freely available high quality online content to accelerate learning.
Every weekday, a truck pulls up to the Cecil H. Green Library, on the campus of Stanford University, and collects at least a thousand books, which are taken to an undisclosed location and scanned, page by page, into an enormous database being created by Google. The company is also retrieving books from libraries at several other leading universities, including Harvard and Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library. At the University of Michigan, Google's original partner in Google Book Search, tens of thousands of books are processed each week on the company's custom-made scanning equipment.
Google intends to scan every book ever published, and to make the full texts searchable, in the same way that Web sites can be searched on the company's engine at google.com. At the books site, which is up and running in a beta (or testing) version, at books.google.com, you can enter a word or phrase—say, Ahab and whale—and the search returns a list of works in which the terms appear, in this case nearly eight hundred titles, including numerous editions of Herman Melville's novel. Clicking on "Moby-Dick, or The Whale" calls up Chapter 28, in which Ahab is introduced. You can scroll through the chapter, search for other terms that appear in the book, and compare it with other editions. Google won't say how many books are in its database, but the site's value as a research tool is apparent; on it you can find a history of Urdu newspapers, an 1892 edition of Jane Austen's letters, several guides to writing haiku, and a Harvard alumni directory from 1919.
With Google having settled its copyright suit with authors and publishers, the company is now poised to be a modern Library of Alexandria with full texts of millions of titles online. Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library, loves the access but wonders at what cost.
The Internet Archive is concerned that the settlement reached by Google and The Authors Guild over the search giant's book-digitization project will put its own online library effort at a competitive disadvantage.
A federal judge overseeing the approval process for the Google Book Search settlement has rejected an attempt by the Internet Archive (IA) to intervene in the action. In a short ruling released today, Judge Dennis Chin wrote that he construed the IA's letter to the court, filed last week, as "a motion to intervene," and denied it. "The proposed interveners are, however, free to file objections to the proposed settlement." Objections and comments must be filed by May 5.
Recorded Lecture: Developing a Culture of Sharing
Cable Green, Ph.D.
Website: Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
PDF: Revolutionizing Education through Innovation: Can Openness Transform Teaching and Learning?
Links: Geoff Cain's Delicious Links of OERs
Video: Plastics Reader
EXTRA CREDIT: Is Google Cornering the Digital Market?
Article: Google's Moon Shot
Podcast: The Infinite Shelf
Article: Internet Archive wants book copyright indemnity like Google
Article: Judge Rejects Internet Archive Motion to Intervene in Google Settlement